VIETNAM VETERANS FOR ACADEMIC REFORM
The University of Kansas Student Auxiliary
V.V.A.R.: Leading the student revolt on campus against speech codes, political correctness, multiculturalism, gender feminism, dormitory re-education, lying about Vietnam, and other instruments of academic oppression.
Leonard Magruder - Founder/President
Former professor of psychology - Suffolk College, N.Y.
Member: National Association of Scholars
CONTACT: Magruder44@aol.com - Phone: 785-312-9303
(Vietnam vet contact: General Carl Schnieder (ret.) Korea, Vietnam
dukesch@aol.com, 480-595-7668)
MAGRUDER DEFEATS “LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD” COVER-UP OF TOP NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES. ALL NORTH CAROLINA HEARS ABOUT VIETNAM VET REJECTION OF KERRY, AND NEW PLAN TO DETER TERRORISTS
Cover-up Defeated
by Leonard Magruder
July 4, 2004
Last week, major Kansas newspapers joined with The Lawrence Journal-World in an effort to cover up the story about Leonard Magruder’s protest at the Lawrence newspaper. Carrying a sign that read “Stop the Media Cover-Up for Kerry,” Magruder, President of Vietnam Veterans for Academic Reform, stood for two hours in front of the paper’s offices while reporters and editors walked by, avoiding him.
Bill Fishburne of North Carolina’s strongest radio station, WWNC, hearing about the Lawrence incident invited Magruder to tell his story on his half-hour show last Sunday, reaching not only the people of North Carolina but those in parts of adjacent states. They heard him discuss two top stories related to national security being covered up by the mainstream media: the massive evidence that Vietnam vets reject Kerry as Commander-in-Chief, and the growing discussion regarding a new plan to deter terrorists.
On the first issue, Magruder reviewed the evidence he had presented in his last four press releases that the media is covering up the fact that a significant majority of Vietnam veterans, people who have experienced war, say that Kerry is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. This is obviously something the American people need to hear about in this hour of danger.
“We first complained about the cover-up in a press release of April 21, 2004, with a list of the anecdotal data on vet rejection of Kerry that had appeared by that time. We protested a second time, this time appealing to world media, on May 3, 2004. By then data was coming in from Vietnam vet groups all over the country confirming the vet rejection of Kerry and we began reporting it in our releases. A third press release went out on May 9. By this time we had been interviewed by two secondary national outlets, on Geoff Metcalf national radio and by Insight Magazine Online.
This claim of a cover-up was confirmed on May 4 at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth announced that 220 out of 229 Swift boat Vietnam veterans contacted (96%) had signed an open letter to Kerry challenging his fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief. This included the entire chain of command above Lt. Kerry, including Admiral Roy Hoffman, who said “I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. armed forces.”
NBC, ABC, and the Associated Press all refused to report to the American people on the conference. Dan Rather mentioned it briefly on CBS Evening News but dismissed it as “allied with the Bush campaign.” Swift Boat Veterans for Truth responded by stating,”These men are neither pawns nor shills, they deserve better than to be ignored and maligned by media organizations increasingly difficult to distinguish from the Kerry campaign itself.”
On May 16 we issued a fourth press release calling on vets to protest by turning off CBS Evening News. By then we were able to report the data from 28 Vietnam vet groups showing an estimated 75% rejection of Kerry as unfit to be Commander-in-Chief. There was no group that supported him.
A second confirmation of the Magruder data came when Talon News out of Washington, D.C., in a press release titled, “Veterans Deserting Kerry,” said “A CBS News poll released this week contained some devastating news for the Kerry campaign. Buried deep inside the internals of a CBS poll released Wednesday was this startling statistic - veterans prefer Bush over Kerry by a whopping 13 points, 54 to 41. Not surprisingly, coverage of the stunning poll result has been slim to none. ‘It’s buried in every poll that I have seen,’ said Bush-Cheney spokesman Scott Stanzel.’”
That is the issue. The mainstream media is cheating to help Kerry. This is a legitimate news story, of importance to the American people. The media is burying it to protect Kerry.
What Vietnam veterans are saying, in poll after poll, is that Kerry would be very weak on national security, compared to President Bush. As J. Michael Waller of Insight/News recently said, “A trademark of the Kerry school of statecraft is making common cause with enemies of the United States, and allowing himself to be used by them, in order to win political battles at home.” We see this in his meetings with the Viet Cong in Paris, his meetings with Communist Ortega in Nicaragua, his comments about Reagan’s attack on Lybia, his recent comment that “terrorism is exaggerated.”
As one Vietnam vet said,”Do we really want a president who organized and led anti-war and anti-American protests and demonstrations under the flag of the enemy we were fighting?” Doesn’t every vet know that preemption (strike first) and unilateralism (no time to consult) are the only logical responses to threats of attack? Kerry has shown he has no understanding of the crisis at all when he refers to these Bush policies as “flawed.”
If the anti-war protests increase, and the American people forget why we are fighting, at some point Kerry will announce that if elected he will end the war and “bring our young men and women home,” and he will win. He will extricate the troops, and leave the place to the terrorists, in much the same way he helped to see that South Vietnam was left to the North. When that happens, the terrorists win.
Said Mr. Magruder, “The North Carolina interview helped to defeat the Kansas media cover-up, nonetheless I will continue in my campaign. I will take my sign to Topeka and parade it at the newspaper there. If that fails, I will take it to Kansas City. If that fails, I will just keep going. Somebody is going to put this story about Vietnam vets polls in a newspaper and on the newswire to the whole country.”
The Deterrence Issue:
By far the most naive in their efforts to analyze the terrorist phenomenon are our academics and media persons, the “root-cause” crowd, who think that by sympathetically attempting to see things from the al-Qaeda point of view we can figure out some way to satisfy their grievances. “It must be something we did to them.” This is also the Kerry approach. His statement that he would insure that, “the conditions that gave rise to the terrorist threat can never recur,” tells us he has no clue as to the connection between Islam and jihad, or terrorism (http://www.JohnKerry.com) “Root cause” people generally argue that “social injustice” of various forms, or previous American policy decisions, have made the Middle East insanely angry at us, and their solution is to back off and let that anger cool down. The terrorists would see this as weakness, leading to massive increase in attacks. The rest of the country dimly senses that the problem has its roots in Islam, but they don’t understand the connection because the media and university have utterly failed to educate them.
Last week PBS held a nation-wide town-hall type program with ordinary citizens speaking out in groups all over the country on the topic of terrorism. These comments were shown to U.S. Congressmen and Senators who in turn made their comments. The betrayal by the media and the univesity was obvious. In the whole hour program on terrorism the word Islam was not mentioned once by any group. For that matter, the word did not appear throughout the Democratic debates. Terrorism was barely mentioned, if at all. Bowing to political correctness and multiculturalism, the media and the university have failed to help us define a mortal enemy, and left us in a coma.
The Bush administration, of course, does understands the enemy, and knows that the only answer is to destroy them.
Wrote Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, “The Allies did not look for the ‘root cause’ of Nazism because they knew that some acts are evil in and of themselves, and do not deserve any consideration or ‘understanding’. Nothing justified Nazism. Nothing justifies terrorism. The terrorists and those who support them must be given a forthright demand: Stop terrorism or face destruction. This is the great mission that now stands before the free world. That the world is standing in front of an abyss seems to be only barely understood.”
It is understood by Bush. It is not understood by Kerry.
The scriptures that lead to terrorism are right there in the Koran, which is why the Muslim world, in an unparalleled moral failure, did not unambiguously and universally condemn the 9/11 attack. It is incorrect to label Osama bin Laden a “fundamentalist,” a deviant from the faith. He can quote any number of scriptures from the Koran, or from the life of Mohammad, to justify his actions. Beheading? That’s an old Islamic trick. Mohammad’s biographers, Ibn Isahaq, Tabari, Mirkhonnd, and W. Muir, all tell of his beheading in one day of the eight hundred Jews of Medina. “Having sated his revenge, and drenched the market-place with the blood of eight hundred victims, and having given command for the earth to be smoothed over their remains, Mohammad returned from the horrid spectacle to solace himself with the charms of Rihana, whose husband had just perished in the massacre.” The media and the university offer America nothing but sugary nonsense when it comes to Islam. The roots of this religion contain real horrors, which, through Islamic law, the ‘sharia’, the terrorists wish to impose on the whole world.
Vast multitudes across the Muslim world support bin Laden, wonder if he does not in fact represent “true” Islam, acting out the violence against “infidels” in the Koran that the moderates try to ignore. The more moderate majority are a silent majority and they are rapidly losing to the more radical elements the contest over who will control and define Islam. Nor is there any way out of this war. Said one al-Qaeda leader, “We will offer no chance for America to come to an agreement with the righteous warriors, no possibility for compromise, no hope for a treaty, no attempt at solution. The war will be waged until the United States remains a memory.” But it doesn’t stop there. Their target is the entire non-Muslim world.
Is the free world under any obligation to stand by and let this happen? Do we have to live in dread every day that one of our cities will disappear overnight? That fear is casting a pall over all our days. We cannot live with it. We need to plan a new collective defense strategy now, because the current strategy, “one terrorist at a time,” is limited. While some are being eliminated, others can be planting nuclear devices in our cities. The only solution is some variant of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), the solution by which we kept Communist Russia at bay for 50 years. The threat of retaliation. This is the most fateful convergence in the history of mankind, an unparalled murderous religious fanaticism with weapons capable of unimaginable mass destruction of life. No scenario can be discounted if there is a chance it can stop an evil like this. It is everbody’s responsibility to try to come up with a solution. This is now a challange our leaders and the whole nation must face.
In the North Carolina interview Mr. Magruder quoted from the following composite of statements on the subject of deterrence from three earlier press releases and two radio interviews, one on the Geoff Metcalf Show, and one on WRUF, Gainsville, to students at the University of Florida. Against the massive resistance of media people, we have been able to raise this issue in a few places and will continue to do so until it becomes an issue of national debate.
(Associated Press) “‘Al-Qassl’a, an Islamist Internet forum, today posted an interview allegedly with Aba Salma Al-Hijazi, an al-Qaeda commander who said, ‘A huge and very courageous strike will take place… the number of “infidels” expected to be killed in the attack exceeds 100,000. The attacks will be carried out in a way that will amaze the world and turn al-Qaeda into an organization that horrifies the world until the law of Allah (Sharia) is implemented. Americans will be the main target, in order to cause disintegration and collapse.’”
“As great a job as is being done by our various agencies in tracking down and eliminating threats by terrrorists, capturing and jailing them, America’s war on terrorism has one vulnerability which must be eliminated. Because they occupy no nation, the terrorists believe they are immune to retaliation. There is, however, the Bush Doctrine, which says that a nation that harbors, or supports, terrorists, is a terrorist nation, a hostile regime. The element that needs to be added to this doctrine is one based on the conditional idea, ‘If you do that - we will do this.’ It is a variation on the policy we had during the Cold War--mutually assured destruction, or MAD. That is, ‘If you attack Washington, D.C., our armies will invade Syria, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or all three.’ That is one scenario. The point is, in one form or another, we must come up with a plan that assures instant, massive, terrifying, retaliation. Terrorists strike in the name of expanding the territory of Islam to the glory of Allah, either converting or executing ‘infidels’. If they know that we will strike back and take half of Islamic territory, then they have no mission, no service to Allah.
“And there is one other part to this plan, one that will make us uncomfortable, even frightened, but it may be the key to stopping the Islamist jihad threatening the free, civilized world: any attack on America and we will destroy Mecca with a nuclear bomb. This idea is proposed in a new and widely advertised book, America’s Answer, by J.Patrick Griffin, Jr. He calls this ‘striking at the psychological generative core of the terrorist movement.’ Doing what they never imagined in their worst moment that we would do, because of our Western values. He compares it to the impact of the destruction of Hiroshima, which ended the war with Japan by destroying the myth that Hirohito was a God who would bring Japan inevitable victory. ‘We must create a vision for them so terrifying that the theological concepts that undergird and inspire their movement will collapse into an utter silence.’ Or as John Keehan, the world’s foremost war historian said, “Until militant Islam has been terrified into passivity, this war will continue for fifty years or more.”
“The state of madness that the terrorists and their supporters have reached is such that nothing short of a sudden and shocking encounter with superpower reality will prepare their minds for negotiation. A religion this much in love with ghastly mayhem and death has no place on this planet. Wrote Griffin, ‘How can we we feel good at the thought of allowing this problem to continue for the next fifty years or more. Our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren would be puntuated by horrific terrorist assaults and nightly news programs dominated by blood, mayhem, and horror.”
“After their first success, the loss of our first city to a nuclear device, there will be a terrible outcry for retaliation. Why not put this threat in place now, in hopes of averting even that one? And note that nothing need happen, as long as the terrorists do not strike at us. This is not a preemptive plan, it is a conditional plan, a warning against striking at us. It is based on the Bush warning that the U.S. will use nuclear weapons, and his announcement that a nation that harbors or aids terrorists is a terrorist nation. On collateral damage, there are millions of Muslims who do not subscribe to the vision of the militants, yet they have shown themselves unable or unwilling to halt the escalating madness of their co-religionists. Under these circumtances where we must strike to save our civilization, while it will mean an enormous injustice to millions of Muslims, responsibility for this injustice could not be rightly charged to the United States. The responsibility lies entirely with the terrorists and the tens of millions of their supporters.We will destroy the enemy because they have left us with no other way of eliminating the total threat they pose to our nation. As to ‘making them mad,’ who cares about that, once they have told us they intend to kill all of us, men, women and children.”
“Just In: An editorial in the New York Post yesterday may have the best plan yet for deterring terrorists.
‘The world must learn that anything that even looks like support for these terrorists brings with it mortal danger. That would mark a paradigm shift - a fundamental change in the way everyone thinks about terrorism. Not long ago, the notion that U.S. fighter planes might be ordered to shoot down civilian airliners over American soil was inconceivable. Few people before 9/11 could even imagine a passenger jet being hijacked and turned into a deadly bomb by box-cutting terrorists. This is a new world, one that requires strategies and tactics that were once all but unimaginable.’
“But here is the idea that may be the key to a successful plan of deterrence. Accordingly, the locating and destroying of the killers may require U.S. forces to strike and destroy terrorist cells in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere with or without the permission of the local rulers. Let’s modify this idea a little. Trained American operatives infiltrate and find the locations of hundreds of terrorist cells in countries everywhere. Even ‘suspected’ locations will do. The President announces that we have the list and if there is a strike by terrorists on American soil, we will destroy all these sites simultaneously, regardless of collateral damage or permission. This eliminates invasions, and nuclear responses.
“The world must end its illusions about Islam. It is the greatest tragedy to ever hit mankind. As the great Middle East scholar Sir William Muir wrote in 1856 in his 4-volume, Life of Muhammad, ‘The sword of Muhammad and the Koran, are the most stubborn enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth which the world has ever known.’”
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Founder/President, V.V.A.R.
Phone: 785-312-9303
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